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Updated: June 1, 2025
"True, O thankless one! but the women of the village say that thou lookest upon me as a fool because I can neither make mats nor do many other things such as becometh a wife. And for this did Merani, my cousin, teach me how to make a wide hat of FALA to shield thy face from the sun when thou art out upon the pearling grounds.
We grew quite friendly, Jensen and I, and he told me he had a small forty-ton schooner at Batavia, in which sturdy little craft he used to go on his pearling expeditions. "I am now," he said, "about to organise a trip to some untouched pearling grounds off the south of New Guinea, but have not sufficient capital to defray the preliminary expenses." This hint I took, and I offered to join him.
But with a flash of this remaining spirit, I imagine my mother Duty to be a sort of old task-mistress, like the hag of the merchant Abudah, in the Tales of the Genii not a hag though, by any means; on the contrary, my old woman wears a rich old-fashioned gown of black silk, with ruffles of triple blonde-lace, and a coif as rich as that of Pearling Jean; a figure and countenance something like Lady D.S.'s twenty years ago; a clear blue eye, capable of great severity of expression, and conforming in that with a wrinkled brow, of which the ordinary expression is a serious approach to a frown a cautionary and nervous shake of the head; in her withered hand an ebony staff with a crutch head, a Tompion gold watch, which annoys all who know her by striking the quarters as regularly as if one wished to hear them.
The horde of people working about the pearling fleet, amphibious by nature, have little need for those accommodations and necessities which the commercial world call "landing facilities." The world over, gambling and speculation are joined in many ways to superstition; and the Eastern diver is superstitious to the hour of his death.
We reached the camping ground quite a little while before sundown, and we certainly had selected an ideal place to camp. A beautiful pearling stream of water, plenty of wood and any amount of grass met our eyes as we came to the place to stop. In a few minutes we had the stock out to grass and the women were busy cooking supper.
We were on the road early in the morning and traveled without stopping until noon, and we saw numerous small bands of Buffalo all along the way. We stopped on the bank of a little pearling stream of cold water, where there was plenty of grass for the horses, and ate our luncheon and rested about an hour.
The article appeared in the Number for June 1827, and is now included in the Prose Misc. Works, vol. xix. pp. 283-367. See Captain John Pringle's remarks on the campaign of 1815 in App. to Scott's Napoleon, vol. ix. pp. 115-160. Lear, Act III. Sc. 4. "Pearling Jean," the name of the ghost of the Spanish Nun at Allanbank, Berwickshire.
Pretty well settled it came to be amongst us that we should be well into Queensland before the police were handy. Starlight and Jim were having a pitch about the best way to get aboard one of these pearling craft, and how jolly it would be.
I had had some experience in blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were on the beach in Samoa we really were on the beach and hard aground when my chance came to go as recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed on before the mast; and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia.
As the months glided into years, and I reviewed the whole of my strange life since the days when I went pearling with Jensen, the thought began gradually to steal into my mind, "Why not wait until civilisation COMES TO YOU as it must do in time? Why weary yourself any more with incessant struggles to get back to the world especially when you are so comfortable here?"
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